"The issue has been resolved and affected merchants should
now be back online," he said.

"We would like to apologise to customers for any
inconvenience that this has caused."

The problem started about 11.30am and was fixed by 12.14pm.

Eftpos company Eftpos Central tweeted just after midday,
advising merchants not to try to process ANZ or National
cards until the fault had been rectified.

People around the country quickly took to social media to
vent their frustration during the fault.

Restaurant Velvet Burger posted a Facebook status about
11.45am which said: "ANZ has an outage at the moment which is
causing the Grababurger issues. The amount of money the banks
make, you'd think they'd have it sewn up."